24 years after it last hosted, the University of Lagos is pulling out all the stops to receive student-athletes and officials from about 75 Nigerian Universities having spent over one billion naira to put facilities in place for the 2022 NUGA Games billed to start on Saturday, March 19 in the school.
This was revealed by the institution’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe while conducting a select group of journalists around the facilities to be used on Saturday morning. After the walk around, the VC answered questions posed to him by the newsmen.
“We are not only ready to host but we are hosting to win,” he began. “We’ve done a lot here in terms of provision of facilities and whatever is not ready today, I want to assure you that by Friday it will all be ready.”
Ogundipe said Unilag as hosts expect a larger number of students and officials from the 75 universities who are coming to participate in 16 sporting events. According to him, some of the events will be hosted off-campus so as to allow the visitors have a feel of Lagos and the University is also involving the traditional institutions with three first class obas already co-opted into the hosting activities.
“This will be the best NUGA Games ever. We cannot put a specific figure out there as the cost of hosting for now but I can tell you it is in excess of one billion naira. The facilities we have here are of the highest standards. The new swimming pool is Olympic-size and easily the best in the country today and same for the cricket and hockey pitches. The football pitch as well as the volleyball and basketball courts are also ready for the games,” he said.
Ogundipe also dispelled fears that the facilities may fall into disrepair after the games by revealing that they’ll be contracted out to a management firm as the institution is still looking to host the West African Universities Games and the African Universities Games in the near future.
He said: “Our athletes have moved to camp and we are sorting out all their complaints so that they can be ready for the games. And let me assure you that there will be adequate security for students, athletes and everyone coming into the University for the NUGA Games. We’re working with the Lagos State government, NDLEA, the Police and our own internal security service. We have CCTV all over so we are ready for all.”
The athletes are also talking tough, rearing to go and can’t wait for the games to start. Okorie Joshua, captain of the football team, reckons they have done enough to claim gold at the NUGA Games.
“We’re prepared, we are eager and the spirit in camp is high. We’ve played lots of games to prepare, even against professional teams and other universities. We won lots of the games, drawn some and lost a few but in all we have learnt valuable lessons. We also trained on our pitch and we are now kind of familiar with it and I think that should give us home-court advantage at the end of the day.”
On her part, Jonpe Grace who’s participating in the Scrabble event insists the months of training will bear good fruits for the host team to reap gold at the end of the games.
“We’re excited and the energy is charged. Everybody can’t wait to start after months of training so hard. We’re now counting down in days to the start of the Games as we all look forward to it. I’m quite confident that all our hard work will pay off with medals.”
The 2022 NUGA Games will run from 19th through Saturday 26th March.
